Allies
by simply-aly
Summary: A follow up to "Reminders" wherein Lincoln ponders some drawings left for him by Clarke as he and Octavia learn about the 100 and the Mountain Men and move to rescue them. Along the way, they run into a few familiar faces...for the both of them. (Essentially an alternate season 2 setup.)


Octavia's injury was a lot more serious than Lincoln first thought. He had intended for them to stop by the cave for only a moment to regroup, gather supplies, and check the wound quickly before getting out of the brewing war-zone. What he didn't count on was the deep wound Octavia had. She couldn't walk and he couldn't carry her if they had to outrun anyone, so they stayed put.

Then they heard the explosion and the screams and—after waiting what he considered to be a safe amount of time—went to inspect the damage.

Lincoln wished he could have been shocked. He wished he hadn't seen worse, but the bones and ash littering the space-kids' camp wasn't as unfamiliar as it should have been. He just held Octavia tightly as he surveyed the scene. From what Octavia had told him while they had waited, he'd had a sense of what their plan had been, and from the looks of it, it worked, so what happened to them all?

She broke down as soon as she realized that no one was there to greet them. "Bellamy wouldn't leave me," she repeated against his chest in between sobs.

"It's too neat," he whispers when her sobs finally diminish to the occasional hiccup. When she looks up at him in a silent demand for him to continue, he adds, "If they had died in the ship, they'd still be there; if they had left, as the door indicates, then there'd be foot prints…trails. We would have been able to track them before even reaching the camp."

"So what happened to them? Where'd they go?"

The answer is at once obvious and terrifying, and requires a great deal of explanation.

Three days later finds them slowly working themselves closer to the forbidden mountain He insists they keep moving, as he's not sure who survived Octavia's people's attack. Nor is he sure how far their newest enemies reach extends.

He and Octavia trade stories as they move through the forest. He tells her about the tribes around here—which ones are truly dangerous, which ones could be allies, and anything else she may find fascinating about life on the ground. She tells him about her life on the ark and, as her own was rather sheltered, relates secondhand the lives of others of her people. And while many of them remain faceless in his memory, there are select number whose pictures he carries in a pocket.

One hand-drawn picture in particular interests him. The blonde leader—Clarke—drew her mother, but Octavia isn't able to tell him much about her. Lincoln knows about Clarke's dad—an engineer, had smooth hands, gave her a watch—but Clarke never told Octavia anything about her mother. He sees the young leader in the picture of her mother, but he doesn't know her the way he's gotten to know the other pictures, and it fascinates him.

The most dangerous time is night time. Enemies can sneak up on each other so easily under the cover of darkness. Lincoln spends most nights awake, watching over Octavia, only falling asleep when the first rays of sunlight pierce the sky and Octavia stirs sleepily beside him.

It's during this nightly vigil that he hears voices—a low, masculine voice and a higher, more feminine one. The man sounds exhausted, while the woman sounds…lost. Lincoln rises from his place beside Octavia and stands at the edge of the clearing, by a tree. He peers beyond the tree into the black forest, watching for figures. He hears their movements near him, and when they're close enough, Lincoln notices that they're speaking English, and their cadence is similar to the space kids' but older.

Everyone paused during the battle to watch more of the sky people fall from space. The sight was beautiful. (Lincoln has since often felt the desire to draw or paint it.) It would seem as though some of them survived, and that he's about to meet them.

He quietly walks back to Octavia, shakes her awake, and puts a finger to his mouth. Octavia nods, and positions herself against a tree near where Lincoln was. When Octavia first hears the man's voice, Lincoln catches recognition in her face. She knows this man, he realizes, but a similar reaction is not present when the woman speaks.

The two sky people's footsteps falter when they approach their site. "Someone's here," the man whispers.

"Maybe they're gone now," the woman answers. "Everything's quiet."

Lincoln moves into their line of sight in that moment. Octavia would later criticize his plan, saying she probably should have been the one to announce their presence. Likely she's right, because he's unfamiliar to them and it's dark out. His clothing and demeanor is frightening sometimes, Octavia once confessed, so it shouldn't have been a surprise when the man pulled out a gun.

Octavia steps in then in fear of his life and wrestles the man for the gun. (This, Lincoln would later criticize as reckless and dangerous, but he is thankful he isn't dead, he is also forced to point out.) At the same time, the woman grabs the closest thing she could find, which was one of the tree branches Lincoln had set aside for firewood and swings it at him. Lincoln barely has the time and reflexes to grab at it, but when he does, he catches her off guard long enough to see her face.

That's when he recognizes her. "Abby," he whispers, shocking her more when he relaxes his stance.

"How do you know my name?" she whispers.

The man, whose gun is now being trained on him by Octavia, also turns to look at him.

Lincoln reaches into his pocket and pulls out the drawings Clarke had drawn in his notebook once. He shuffles through the ones he's kept, and finds her picture. He hands it to her.

The man shuffles around carefully, eying Octavia suspiciously, who angrily hisses, "I'll pull the trigger, I swear." Lincoln's a bit taken aback by her demeanor—the hatred she has for this man is palpable, but she allows him to pull out a flashlight, which he hands to the woman now known to be Abby.

"Clarke drew these," Octavia supplies for Lincoln, recognizing the pieces of paper.

Abby's eyes shine. "My daughter…she's _alive_?"

Lincoln nods. "They've been taken," he finally speaks, finally (though rather reluctantly) coming to terms with the fact that he and Octavia have likely picked up two more traveling companions.


End file.
